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January Mayor's Message: Looking at the year ahead

Happy New Year Chestermere! On behalf of City Council, we hope you had a wonderful holiday season with your family and friends.

As we move into another year, it offers an opportunity to reflect on the past year and look ahead to the future.

At the end of November, I gave a speech to the Chamber of Commerce that covered some of our achievements over the past year. The main highlights from that speech are available at www.chestermere.ca/news if you’d like to take a look at our progress on a tax decrease, CUI and our strategic plan.

As we move into 2019, I am particularly looking forward to making progress on 4 things:

1. CUI: Last fall, we announced that the company would be coming back under municipal oversight. Council now comprises the board of the company and we have hired Rick Quail (the former Town Manager for Okotoks) to help us transition the company. Follow our progress at www.chestermere.ca/cui.

2. CMRB: The Calgary Metropolitan Region Board (CMRB) is a group of leaders from Calgary and all the communities surrounding Calgary. We started meeting last year and I am really looking forward to mapping out how we can better collaborate with our neighbours, especially when it comes to growth and servicing.

3. Finding Efficiencies: Last year we hired a new Chief Administrative Officer. While Bernie Morton only started in the summer, he quickly got to work to make improvements at City Hall. He is planning

to do a full review of our organization to find further efficiencies in 2019. I am very much looking forward to seeing the results of his efforts to find ways to serve you better.

4. Seniors’ Housing: We know that we don’t have much in place for seniors in our community. We held an open house last fall and have now created a new Task Force to dig into this issue further. We hope that in 2019 they can create a holistic plan that sets out initiatives to help our seniors stay in Chestermere.

2018 was really about turning the ship in a new direction. Now that we have set our course, I am looking forward to sailing faster and making some progress on our key priorities.

As always, please stop by or get in touch with us at any time. We’re here to listen.